Building Momentum By Tracking Behaviour

If you really want to get going on your business growth, a great way to do that is to commit yourself to a 30 day challenge. In this Coaching Tip I’m going to talk about tracking your behaviour for a month. It’s all about learning what you actually do to get results.

There are specific activities you must be consistent with to progress your career. These are the basics:
• Build your database
• Get face to face with clients

The primary behaviours necessary to perform those activities are calls, connects, and appointments. You have to make a lot of calls in order to speak directly with a few people because over 50% of your calls will connect you with voicemail. You have to connect with people before you can get appointments with them. Only a few of those direct connects will result in an appointment, and appointments are vital in getting your listings and sales. Keep a record of all your calls, how many connected you to a person, and how many result in an appointment.

You can see how important it is for you to be on the phone every morning before other daily tasks distract you. It really is the most important thing you do each day because you don’t get those appointments unless you make enough calls to book appointments, and you want to try to secure 3 each day.

There are 3 kinds of appointments you can make, and you want to track on how many of each you book:
• Bar appointments
• Market appraisal appointments
• Listing appointments

The bar appointment is good for finding out what a client might want to buy or have to sell, and for maintaining that relationship so they will come to you when they are ready to move.

Market appraisal appointments put you on the client’s property where you can evaluate its worth. It also allows you to decide how to progress them by determining where they are on the traffic light –
• Red — they’re not going to sell
• Orange – they might be willing to consider selling
• Green — they’re ready to get to it

The listing appointment is the most crucial of the three as this is where you sell yourself. It’s a delicate balance between making a solid case for them to hire you, or driving them off by pushing too hard. The secret is in making your proposal all about their needs and desires.

At the end of your 30 day challenge you can look at your numbers and categories, see how many listings you made, and learn where you achieved progress or met with resistance. Make sure your focus in tracking is for effort, not reward. Looking at sales and income is gratifying, but it won’t teach you anything about your effectiveness. Look at the numbers of appointments and new listings you won. It’s putting forth the effort that brings those rewards.

Now do this again the next month and you will be on your way to seeing some real growth happen in your business.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Ep 6 – All About Assistants

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents, Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips note that the hardest and best decision you make in your business is to put on that first assistant. The cost may seem prohibitive, but is offset by your ability to do more transactions while maintaining momentum and consistency. Alexander outlines tasks an assistant can relieve you from doing so you can focus on prospecting and seeing clients, and lists attributes to look for in a new hire.

They also discuss how to nurture, temper and grow a new hire to become more valuable, gain skills and experience, and achieve their own goals. Adding on more assistants is next, again realizing benefits versus cost, and how they motivate you to increase profits. Josh stresses the importance of meetings, team building, and instilling a sense of personal investment in the business.

Scaling Your Business

You want to grow your business, but there’s only so much work you can accomplish by yourself. My Coaching Tip today is about how to scale your business by hiring people to do those time-consuming basic tasks that keep you from focusing on the work that’s most important.

You have to let go in order to grow. That’s a basic fact of life and it’s the same for your business. You may feel the need to have your hands in every task, but do you want to be a real estate agent or an administrative assistant? Find the people who do admin support better than you and hire them. I promise you, it will take every minute of your time to become a great agent. Put a support team together and let them take care of the housekeeping.

How many open houses can you personally work on a Saturday? Realistically that number would be six. How are you going to increase your listings if you can’t show more than six homes in a day? If you want to show more homes, you have to have other people to prepare and show another six, or twelve, or twenty-four homes on a Saturday.

It’s all about capacity, and the only way you can increase that is to put on assistants and other agents to do more work than you can do alone. And frankly, they will do a better job than you, because if you are trying to work beyond your own capacity your performance – and your numbers — will suffer for it.

You need to hire a buyer assistant to show the homes, a second assistant to prep each home for inspection, and an administrative assistant to enter data, follow up on emails and online contacts, prepare lists and reports, and cover all the other agency housekeeping tasks. As your business expands, your team will grow.

Let go of the limiting belief that you have to do everything because you simply can’t scale your business trying to do it all yourself. Make the decision to hire great people to do the tasks that are holding you back. Then you can focus on prospecting, appointments, listings and sales.

Make sure you look into our Josh Phegan Company membership, Master Class Program, Prospecting School, and our incredible Blueprint Event, all coming up soon.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Ep 5 – Expectations for Pricing

In the current market client expectations for pricing are high, but there is more demand than stock. This High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents features Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discussing how best to advise clients around pricing. With buyers wanting to pay less and vendors wanting to sell for more, you must provide realistic pricing guidance from the start. This begins with knowing where your client is in their process – are they hesitant, weighing their options, or ready to go?

Are they making emotional decisions, or do they need a certain price point to finance something other than another property? To help them make good decisions you must understand their situation and balance that with the realities of the market. Josh and Alexander outline information you must know and where to get it, what to present to clients, and how to effectively advise them.

Opportunity Within Your Business

Opportunity is as close as your database, but you have to go after it. My Coaching Tip today is about using what you already have, and improving on what you already do, to create more opportunities inside of your business.

Your database should contain everyone you know and have ever met, categorised and accessible. How many of those people have you contacted in the past month – or the past year? Every one of those names is a potential opportunity, especially your past buyers.

Anyone who has ever been through one of your open homes is a potential buyer. So are customers you’ve sold a home to, because they won’t be in that home forever. Are you keeping in touch with them? Always follow up with open for inspections. Always call new buyers within 2 weeks of their purchase from you, and also call the people who looked at the home and didn’t buy it. People who are looking at homes for sale are active in the market. That’s opportunity.

Market appraisals are also prime opportunities. All of them, including the ones you met with years ago. Call them up and see how things have progressed with them, and whether they might be considering selling. Past clients are some of the most overlooked opportunities for most agents, especially since people move more often now than ever before. Someone you met with last year could be ready to sell today. Will they call you? You should be keeping up with them to make certain they do.

Being consistent with the basics is what creates successful agents. Know who you are calling and why, and know what you need to say – and what you don’t. If you’re making those calls, but not booking appointments, you may need to change your approach. Try recording yourself to find out what you are really saying and how your delivery sounds. Make sure your dialog is not putting people off. Keep it brief and positive.

Don’t wait for opportunities to come to you. Use your database, stay in touch with your past clients, and keep your call sessions consistent and productive.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Capacity

Everything works according to design, so if you’re not getting the business capacity you need it’s because you haven’t built the structure for it. My Coaching Tip today will show you how to design a better business for recovery, efficiency and scalability.

There are three things you must have for rapid growth:
• Fitness
• Systems
• People

Just as your level of fitness in the gym determines your speed of recovery, your business fitness shapes your capacity for listings and sales. The best agents recover quickly from failure and keep going to the next opportunity without pause. It’s not that they never fall short; they do. They simply don’t let the shortfalls stall their momentum. If you falter every time you lose a listing, then you miss out on the next opportunity. Procrastination is a real killer – you’re not going to progress if you don’t make the decision to pick yourself up, get back on track and start running again.

Having a tight system in place helps you recover quickly and stay on track. Automating as many processes as possible reduces time spent inputting data and maintaining the system. Entering data just once is key – your system should then take that data and send it where it needs to go. New client information gathered from open for inspections and online inquiries can be automatically channelled into categories, email listings, reports, call lists and alerts if you design your system efficiently. And your people are a vital component of your system.

In order to do the work that’s most important, you must have capable, trainable people in place to ensure everything gets done without your having to put your valuable time into housekeeping. For manual data entry as well as providing you with lists and reports you require for prospecting, you need assistants. Making sure your system is structured properly assures that their work can be done quickly and accurately. The less time they have to spend performing their tasks, the more work they can accomplish for you. Your system design coupled with your choices in hiring will determine how productive your agency can be.

Look at your business and evaluate your fitness, your systems and your people. Where do you see blockages? Where are there gaps? What can you automate? What tasks and processes can be handled more efficiently? How can you recover more quickly? Knowing what to look for will help you address these problems and increase your capacity.

Make sure you look into our Josh Phegan Company membership, Master Class Program, Prospecting School, and our incredible Blueprint Event, all coming up soon.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

Ep 4 — Growth

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talk about what causes some agents to stop growing their business. Fear and misgivings around taking the next steps upward is usually the problem. Many agents also reach a peak and feel that they can coast, but that’s where they lose momentum and fall behind. Consistency with your goals, health and aspirations are crucial.

Tracking your numbers for listings, sales and income production will keep you driving forward. Monthly goals with weekly progress checks will keep you active and motivated as you reach and surpass goals you thought were impossible. Be open to change and adapt to new trends and technologies. The more opportunities you create, the more exciting the work becomes and the more abundance you realise.

Ep 3 – Time Management

Time management is the topic for this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents as Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discuss how your work day should begin early with a consistent daily regimen. Your entire year should be scheduled in advance with your primary focus on daily prospecting and appointments, but also make sure you book holidays and events to look forward to as a reward for your hard work.

Energy management through exercise and nutrition is vital, too, because you can’t do the work if you don’t maintain high energy. Keeping prospecting calls short and to the point is necessary, so know exactly what you need to tell the client and questions you need to ask, and keep on topic. Delegating tasks to assistants is also key so you can stay focused on the work that matters most.

Ep 2 – Prospecting


In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan interviews Alexander Phillips on prospecting, which is your most important task for building listings. A clean database with accurate categories is vital. The database has to be growing constantly, and every single person you know should be in it. Open homes are critical for lead generation, and everyone you meet is a four-dimensional customer: a potential buyer, landlord, tenant, or seller.

Maintain relationships and be relevant, frequent and consistent to all your customers so that when they need an agent they will come to you. The key to exceptional growth inside your business is to be prospecting all the time. Alexander outlines his daily schedule that keeps him on the phone or meeting appointments with customers every minute.

Ep 1 – Building Momentum

Success in real estate depends on how hard you drive yourself and how much you enjoy it. In this first High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan talks with Alexander Phillips about his brand, Phillips Pantzer Donnelley, which cleared fees of 4.85 million last year. Alexander is driven by his desire for financial security and a high quality of life. He believes you have to make a decision about what kind of agent you want to become and have a clear vision of where you want to end up.

A mentor who is where you want to be will help you clarify your own aspirations. Moving from scarcity to abundance requires raising the bar on your goals every year and being accountable for your progress every day. Learning to save money in order to grow wealth is key. Structure your life as well as your work — schedule everything long-term. Having a clear vision also makes it easier to get your team on board with your directives.